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Daniel Bälz Posts

It’s true, this blog (aka post-conference-slide-dump) needs more care to be useful. One of my personal goals is to write more articles, but I’m not sure if this blog is the right place to post them. Therefore, I’ll disable the comment section and change the theme/design in the future.

However, there are two more talks to mention. I enjoyed both and the discussions afterwards made a lot of fun. The first talk was at the Kotlin User Group Karlsruhe and announced as “A very personal dive into my favorite Kotlin features”. Fortunately, the title and content changed. In the end we had some “Fun with Functions” and the talk consisted mainly of a live demo. This demo covers the topics higher-order functions, extensions functions and function literals with receiver (especially lambda with receiver to create a DSL with Kotlin).

The second talk was a shorter one. I did an introduction into Kotlin at Kotlin Development Karlsruhe meetup. There are no slides or demo code. It was more or less a stripped down and revised version of my talk at GDG DevFest Karlsruhe. (Disclaimer: I’m one of the organizer, so it wasn’t that hard to get a slot in our first meeting)

Although I worked on interesting topics at work and in private, posts on my blog are still rare. However, once a year there’s a good reason to write a post: As in the previous years, I attended at the GDG DevFest Karlsruhe. The conference was great again and I had the opportunity to give a talk. My topic was “Kotlin for Android-Developer”, which is an amazing programming language I’ve use for some time in different projects.

In addition to a few slides in German, my talk consisted mainly of a live demo. I’ve uploaded the demo code on Github. This code is certainly less useful without my explanations, but some participants asked me about it. So, have fun with Kotlin and if you’re interested in a Kotlin Meetup in Karlsruhe: There’s a Kotlin User Group with great talks, discussions and exchange of ideas.

Another amazing GDG DevFest Karlsruhe is over. The DevFest was, as in the previous years, a really great conference. So many interesting talks and curious visitors.

I also contributed to the conference: In my talk I spoke about my experiences in the development of a modern Android app. The talks was held in German and if you’re interested in the slides, I’ve uploaded them here.

Finally, the source code of my master’s thesis is published as open source under the BSD license. In my thesis I developed two libraries to support decision-making at runtime and adaptive code execution with Dart:

Furthermore, a blog post on the blog of my employer inovex GmbH explains the motivation and provides more information about the libraries. I hope the libraries are useful and/or give an interesting glimpse into the topic of adaptive code execution. Feel free to contact me for any questions, fork the project or report issues.

I’ve just released a new Android application in the PlayStore and the source code on Github. The On-Off Tracker is an application to measure how often the screen has been switched on and off. In addition, it also tracks how often the device is unlocked.

The very small project was initiated by a question of a friend whether such an app is possible. The answer is “yes”. I hope it’s useful for someone and the numbers counted don’t scare. 🙂

To show some sample code, I have also written a very simple game for my talk. The source code is on GitHub and you get the game from Google Play. If you’re interested in this subject and you want to discuss with me, then feel free to post a comment or to contact me on Google Plus or GitHub.

After a long time without a post a short note. Together with Tim Roes I did a workshop/talk on the GridKA School 2014. The topic was Getting started with Android and App Engine and there are slides and a sample project . Happy reading and coding!

After the project (part of my study) is now over, I would like to show the current status of Secludedness and provide an outlook for the further development. The aim of the project was the development of a cross-platform game with libGDX and Google Play Game Services. Therefore, I will briefly review the state of the entire game and the platform support.

After I explained the functionality of the Google Play Game Services in the last post, I’d like to show how to combine libGDX and GPGS. I will demonstrate this on the three supported platforms of Secludedness (Android, Desktop and Browser) and show the problems and difficulties which I’m so far encountered.